Question

What do you call the process wherein the energy absorbed by an electron is released, and it goes back to its ground state?

a) Fluorescence
b) Ionization
c) Luminescence
d) Electron Transition

Answer 1

The process where an electron releases energy and falls back to its ground state is called fluorescence. During this process, an excited electron returns to the ground state and emits a photon of lower energy than the one absorbed.

Step-by-step explanation:

The process where an electron releases energy and falls back to its ground state is known as fluorescence. During fluorescence, an electron first gets excited to a higher energy level after absorbing a photon, usually a high-energy UV photon. Then, it loses some of the absorbed energy as heat or molecular vibrations, and when the electron returns to the ground state, the remaining energy is emitted as a photon of lower energy, usually as visible light. This is different from ordinary atomic emission, where the photon emitted is of the same energy level as the photon absorbed.

This is in contrast to electron transition, which refers more generally to any movement of electrons between energy states, and ionization, where the electron is completely removed from the atom. Luminescence is a broader term that encompasses various types of light emission, including fluorescence.